With the rise of WebKit based browsers, it's worth looking at them for a replacement for Firefox and Opera in situations where neither are suitable.

Marco Peereboom has a vi-inspired browser based around WebKit, it's strictly a no frills experience though, others include midori and an old chromium port.

Comparing OpenBSD and FreeBSD for desktop usages is kind of difficult to do fairly, they both have arguably comparable feature sets.. but sometimes in different areas.

The websites of each project attempt to highlight these, and with further research you can dig up more information, but in the end I believe it's safe to say that most of the regulars here started out trying several different systems before settling on the one that came closest to matching all our needs, technical and philosophical.

Some end up deciding to use a wide variety of different OS's, in tandem, perhaps that just fits their requirements.

Anyway, it's all debatable in the end, listing out the reasons for choosing one or another doesn't really serve much of a purpose in the end.

Im thinking about using OpenBSD or FreeBSD for my desktop. Can someone tell the advantages of FreeBSD over OpenBSD?

I have a little bit of experience with openbsd (mostly firewall/pf)

I can not think of the single serious advantage of FreeBSD over OpenBSD for a typical desktop user.
If I have to come up with one that would be existence of the native Opera web-Browser for FreeBSD.
That being said I made this post from Opera running on the top of OpenBSD 4.8 with bsd.mp kernel.

OpenBSD lacks bigmem support, so if you have a desktop with more than about 3.5 GB of RAM, it'd be wasted on OpenBSD.

That is not true. Support for RAM is architecture dependent. OpenBSD would probably easily see 1TB of RAM on sparc64. If we are talking about i386 and amd64 the situation is of course different. i386 theoretically doesn't support more than 3GB of RAM. PAE kernel is a big joke.
amd64 hardware until recently was too buggy for more than 4GB of memory

OpenBSD will probably support more than 4GB of RAM on amd64 but I have a hard time to see how is that useful to a desktop user (see original question). Actually larger memory space can easily make applications more sluggish.

I fail to see how zfs would be useful for a typical desktop user. On another hand udf (blue ray, dvd) is for most desktop users very important. OpenBSD has second to none support for udf file system (it is better than Windows support). You can read cvs commits. Having a great audio server in the base is also a big + for OpenBSD.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alphalutra1

AHCI and NCQ support,

You are not very familiar with OpenBSD...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alphalutra1

and flash plugin support are the ones I can think of off the top of my head

I fail to see how FreeBSD supports Flash. Native Flash doesn't exist for FreeBSD. Linux emulation is most definitely better on FreeBSD if for no other reason for the fact that OpenBSD binary emulation is disappearing code. It is dead for all practical purposes. If he needs Flash Windows is the way to go.

Java barely works on FreeBSD on another hand the latest Icedtea is ported to NetBSD. Work is in progress on OpenBSD. Support for native SUN Java works far better on OpenBSD than on FreeBSD but that is beyond the point.

The most important from desktop user point of view is a list of apps available.

I agree.

Quote:

Originally Posted by klanger

Since OBSD has a smaller number of them, simply have a look if most of apps that you use every day are available.

Exactly. It is important what you use on the daily base. I for instance use every day TeXLive. TeXLive is not ported to FreeBSD! Lots of my HPC friends use Portland compilers. Those do not exist neither for FreeBSD nor for OpenBSD. OpenBSD is not usable as HPC platform.

Quote:

Originally Posted by klanger

Advantages of FreeBSD over any other BSD is a big "community" & number of ports.

Big doesn't necessary mean more knowledgeable although I have a very deep respect for some FreeBSD people (Examples include but not limited to Dr. Colin Percival and Dr. Robert Watson)

Number if ports is a fake argument. It really depends what you use. I will go as far as to claim that a typical desktop applications like MPlayer, Sane-backends, HPLIP are far more up to date on OpenBSD than on FreeBSD. FreeBSD supports far less network hardware and has no support (except for the cheap hack which uses Linux drivers) for video devices of any kind.

* I know OpenBSD can run Opera in Linux compatibility mode, but SMP has to be off and it's not really as stable/fast as I would like.

Disable memory cache on Opera. In general OpenBSD Linux comp is dead so you are right that people who do love Opera should not have OpenBSD as their first choice.

I would actually like to bring one fact commonly left out when it comes to desktop use. What do developers use on their desktops? A typical FreeBSD developer uses MAC and runs OS X. A typical OpenBSD developer eats his own soup.

What stops me from even trying OBSD/NetBSD is the lack of img file - I use BSD on my netbook since it has a "good hardware for BSD" but it has no cd-rom (as most netbooks).
Is there a way to install OBSD form an usb-stick?

OT: To be honest, I like DragonFlyBSD with HAMMER fs which works very well on even small ssd (20GB). I had (or dfbsd) a problem with packages and pkgsrc after an upgrade of some of it part & I'm waiting for new release which is scheduled on this september. Can't wait

What stops me from even trying OBSD/NetBSD is the lack of img file - I use BSD on my netbook since it has a "good hardware for BSD" but it has no cd-rom (as most netbooks).
Is there a way to install OBSD form an usb-stick?

An image file isn't necessary, FAQ 14.17.3 shows an easy way to do it if you lack an existing installation of OpenBSD to work with.

If you own another system that has a floppy or CD-ROM drive, which also has a USB port, you can boot the floppy/CD-ROM and prepare the USB drive for booting on the netbook.. either manually or just by doing a full installation of OpenBSD right onto the USB drive.

Other options from FAQ 4.13.6 include PXE booting (..if BIOS/Ethernet support it) or simply obtaining a USB floppy/CD-ROM drive and use the regular installation media.

Don't want to paint bikesheds, but FreeBSD can be upgraded binary quite easily using either freebsd-update or manually with the tarfiles if you really want to.
Using packages is also quite feasible, I've been using packages almost exclusively for the last year orso ...
It's certainly true that the emphasis is often on source builds, but binary builds/upgrades work quite well too.

The only thing I build from source nowadays is the kernel on my laptop, for the reason that not compiling in some drivers saves power so the battery will last longer.

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